Stories

Christmas Miracle: A little paint and a family bond

This column by Scrimmage Play’s Bart Isley originally appeared in the December 2010 issue of Scrimmage Play.

I don’t even remember what year it was or even really how old I was. But I remember exactly how we saw it.

After opening a bunch of Christmas presents on Christmas morning — almost surely at a time earlier than anyone should have allowed to happen—my dad asked my brother and I to go upstairs and look out the bedroom window that overlooked the back yard. It seemed an odd request on Christmas morning, but we didn’t argue, we just raced upstairs.

We lived in a modest house in Eastern North Carolina, and because it’s Eastern North Carolina, we had a huge, flat backyard. It was just about the most perfect, level expanse of grass that you’ve ever seen. The kind that as a kid seems endless and packed with possibility. It had been a working town with stores, and even a battlefield.

That day it was a football field. A real football field.

My dad had lined off the entire yard with spray paint yardlines, complete with a huge G in the middle, styled after the Green Bay Packers’ timeless logo. There were my brother and I’s names, endzones and numbers for the yardlines. It was perfect.

We stared in awe for a few seconds before leaping up and down with excitement. Predictably, we wanted to get out there as soon as possible and start playing, but there were family obligations and we had to make a tour of the grandparents’ houses before we set foot on our gridiron. That didn’t stop us from immediately putting on the new football gear we’d received and wearing it for the short trip across town to my grandparents’ house. I mean, we had our own field, how were we not going to be dressed like football players? I’d gotten a full Packers setup — the real youth football stuff, not Hutch’s imitation uniform that we’d had before — while my brother was geared up in Joe Montana’s San Francisco 49ers uniform. It was a rebellious phase that he rarely talks about anymore, but my dad indulged him, knowing that he’d come back around.

How couldn’t he either? The Packers are family tradition, especially around the holidays.

My dad’s love of the green and gold squad started as a small child in a small North Carolina town, far from Wisconsin and the Frozen Tundra where Vince Lombardi was then building the franchise into a legend, and my grandmother, saint that she is, knew that a kids-size Packers helmet would make her five-year-old’s holiday. In 1964, there wasn’t NFL.com and the league’s marketing department wasn’t the global force it is today. So she wrote a letter to the Packers’ organization asking where she could find a youth helmet, and someone there connected her to a store in Green Bay that sold them. She filled out an order form, sent in a check and in turn brought a little piece of the Packers back to the south.

My dad just walked into the living room that Christmas morning, found the helmet and strapped on his new treasure. He then headed upstairs to his parents room wearing it all the way, standing next to my grandfather’s side of the bed whispering “Daddy, daddy, daddy” before announcing his find.

That’s why he had to take it to the next level with his kids and line off that backyard in what was one of the finest, most awe-inspiring presents I ever received.

Now I’ve got a nearly two-year-old son Jack, and he’s already opened an important window. I tried my best to get him interested in some other things — but football is currently his number one passion. He went through a stretch where he refused to wear any shirt that didn’t have a football or a helmet on it. We had to buy four more for him to get him through the week. Early in football season at a game I was covering, he had to be corralled near the pylon of the endzone after he broke loose from his mom. He kept yelling “Football, football, football” as loud as his little lungs could handle throughout the parking lot stopping only to sob uncontrollably at the prospect of being taken home from the game.

So we recently ordered him a toddler-size, Green Bay jersey with linebacker A.J. Hawk’s number on it.

It’s no football field — that’ll have to come later — but it’s part of something awfully special.

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